SB 933 
.F6 
Copy 1 



Illinois State Laboratory 



OF 



Natural History 



Urbana, Illinois, U. S. A. 



STEPHEN A. FORBES, Ph. D., LL.D. 
Director 



THE INSECT, THE FARMER, THE TEACHER, THE CITIZEN, 

AND THE STATE 



BY 
STEPHEN A. FORBES 



1915 



^ -^^ 

O 

Q^ THE INSECT, THE FARMER, THE TEACHER, THE CITIZEN, 
.^ AND THE STATE* 

^_^'^ By Stephen A. Forbes, 

Illinois State Entomologist 

When, a year and a half ago, entomology was separated from zoology 
as a department at the University of Illinois, I was asked by one of the 
college deans if I did not think that it was too limited and subordinate 
a subject for departmental independence. I replied that entomology was 
really the larger half of zoology — an answer which was taken as jocular 
and received with some amusement, but which was intended seri- 
ously, and which can be substantially justified from several points of 
view. 

In the first place, it has been estimated by a conservative naturalist 
of world-wide reputation that more than half of the animal matter of 
the land surfaces of the globe is locked up in the bodies of insects. That 
is to say, if all the elephants and lions and buffaloes and horses and 
cattle and hogs and birds and snakes and lizards of the earth were put 
into one pan of a gigantic balance, and all its insects into the other, the 
insect collection would be found to outweigh all these other land animals 
taken together. It is difficult, of course, to prove that this is so, but the 
very fact that a naturalist of established reputation should deliberately 
put forth such a statement in an important work shows how dominant a 
position insects occupy in the life of the world. Undoubtedly the num- 
ber of species of insects in the world greatly surpasses that of all other 
terrestrial animals; which is another way of saying that the number of 
fixed variations of structure, form, color, and the like, to be found in in- 
sects is greater than that presented by all other land animals. By reason 
of this extraordinary power of variation, and hence of adaptation — of 
fitness to various conditions and situations — insects are very widely dis- 
tributed, and are found in a greater variety of places and surroundings 
than any other class of land animals on the earth. They are able to 
maintain themselves, in other words, in a greater number of ways and 

* An address delivered December 13, 1910, to a joint meeting of teachers and 
farmers at Normal, lU. 



to avail themselves of a larger variety of the resources of the earth than 
any other animals. They are, in fact, of all land animals, the most suc- 
cessful class, the best adapted to the conditions of life on earth of any 
that now exists, or ever has existed. 

Among their most extraordinary attainments is a tribal organiza- 
tion which actually surpasses anything known among primitive men. 
Their industrial classes are not such by choice or by accident merely, 
but by instinct, and by original and exclusive inclination and capacity. 
Their soldiers fight, their workers work, their housekeepers keep house, 
and their fathers and mothers fulfil their appropriate functions just as 
''dogs delight to bark and bite," because "it is their nature to"; and 
such is the prevailing spirit of self-sacrifice for the general good of a 
group of the so-called social insects that it is scarcely too much to say 
that any bee or wasp or ant might well become a candidate for a Car- 
negie medal almost any day of its life. 

Possessed of all these powers and capacities, it is not to be wondered 
at that we find among them dangerous and tireless competitors with our- 
selves for the use and control of the earth. The struggle between man 
and insects began long before the dawn of civilization, has continued 
without cessation to the present time, and will continue, no doubt, as 
long as the human race endures. It is due to the fact that both men and 
certain insect species constantly want the same things at the same time. 
Its intensity is owing to the vital importance to both of the things they 
struggle for, and its long continuance is due to the fact that the contest- 
ants are so equally matched. We commonly think of ourselves as the lords 
and conquerors of nature, but insects had thoroughly mastered the world 
and taken full possession of it long before man began the attempt. They 
had, consequently, all the advantage of a possession of the field when the 
contest began, and they have disputed every step of our invasion of their 
original domain so persistently and so successfully that we can even yet 
scarcely flatter ourselves that we have gained any very important advan- 
tage over them. Here and there a truce has been declared, a treaty made, 
and even a partnership established, advantageous to both parties to the 
contract — as with the bees and silkworms, for example ; but wherever 
their interests and ours are diametrically opposed, the war still goes on 
and neither side can claim a final victory. If they want our crops they 
still help themselves to them. If they wish the blood of our domestic 



By Tranefer 

WAY 241^23 



animals, they pump it out of the veins of our cattle and our horses at 
their leisure and under our very eyes. If they choose to take up their 
abode with us we can not wholly keep them out of the houses we live in. 
We can not even protect our very persons from their annoying and 
pestiferous attacks, and since the world began we have never yet ex- 
terminated — we probably never shall exterminate — so much as a single 
insect species. They have, in fact, inflicted upon us for ages the most 
serious evils without our even loiowing it. It is the cattle tick which 
keeps alive and spreads the Texas fever ; it is the mosquito which inocu- 
lates our blood with yellow fever and malaria ; it is the house-fly which 
carries to our food the germs of typhoid fever; it is the flea of the rat 
and of other rodents which just now threatens all America with that 
dread disease, the bubonic plague, — and now that we have begun to dis- 
cover facts of this order, many other instances of this kind will no doubt 
presently be brought to light. 

Not only is it true that we have not really won the fight with the 
world of insects, but we may go farther and say that by our agricul- 
tural methods, by the extension of our commerce, and by other means 
connected with the development of our civilization, we often actually 
aid them most effectively in their competition with ourselves. Our 
rapidly growing, world-wide commerce of fruits and grains, our importa- 
tion of new plants from the remotest regions of the earth, often bring 
their special insect enemies with them, and our exports of our own best 
varieties, in turn, have the practical effect of establishing a general inter- 
national exchange of injurious insects, such that we seem certain to be- 
come the eventual prey of every insect species living anywhere on earth 
that can do us any harm. 

I bring these facts together here in this general way to remind you 
that the difficulties we labor under are neither temporary nor excep- 
tional, and to show you, as well as I can, that our struggle with insects 
is a serious and important matter, calling for the fullest knowledge and 
the most thoroughgoing experiment, and calling also for that kind of 
patriotism which consists in spending time and labor and money for the 
general welfare. We might as well expect to repel an armed invasion 
of our country by leaving every householder, unaided, to drive the 
enemy from his own door as to expect to quell insect attack upon our 



persons and property without concerted measures of defense and with- 
out self-sacrificing effort for the common good. 

It is worth our while, I am sure, to pause for a moment over the 
question, "What is there in or about an insect — small, weak, simple, 
short-lived, ignorant, mechanical, and conservative to the last degree, as 
it is — which can give it any standing whatever in competition with a 
relatively huge, powerful, complex, intelligent, progressive, and re- 
sourceful being like man ? It is, indeed, in these very points of its weak- 
ness that it finds its greatest strength. Its small size makes it incon- 
spicuous to our notice, and enables it to find shelter and support in mul- 
titudes where a single human being would perish from exposure or 
starve to death. Starting abreast of us, at its origin in a single minute 
germ cell, it can complete its simple process of development, grow to 
adult size, and begin to reproduce its kind in a few weeks or months, in 
some cases in a few days only, while we require perhaps twice as many 
years. It can thus fit itself much more rapidly and exactly to tempo- 
rarily favorable conditions, and can retreat with much less loss from those 
unfavorable, than can a creature whose lumbering size, enormous de- 
mands, slow growth and still slower reproduction make it sluggish in re- 
sponse and clumsy in adaptation. 

Furthermore, the feeding and respiratory capacity of a small animal 
is greater in proportion to its size and its individual necessities than is 
that of a large animal, and it has therefore a larger surplus of energy, 
derived from its food and oxygen, to dispose of. Its need of food and 
air for mere existence is proportionate to its bulk or mass, but its power 
of absorbing these is proportionate to its absorbent surfaces. As an ani- 
mal grows, its bulk increases, and with this its need of nourishment, as 
the cube of its diameters ; while its absorbent surfaces increase, and with 
these its powers of respiration and digestion, as the square of its diame- 
ters only. The square of a number being less than its cube, the larger 
of two animals will, other things being equal, have a smaller proportion 
of its energies to dispose of, beyond its bare needs for maintenance, than 
will the smaller one. Divide a hundredweight of living matter into ten 
thousand living animals and it will have a very much greater surplus of 
energy and activity to expend in impressing itself on the outer world 
than it could have if concentrated in a single animal weighing a hundred 
pounds. Grasshoppers, for example, can devour and absorb many times 



as much food to the hundred pounds of flesh as can a man, and a hun- 
dredweight of these insects have consequently many times as much 
energy to expend, outside their bodies, as does a hundred-pound boy or 
girl. It is this which makes it possible for the beetle or the bug to mul- 
tiply habitually at a rate which, if it were applied to man, would vir- 
tually destroy the race by over-population, perhaps within a single gen- 
eration. It is this great surplus of available energy which enables an 
insect to exhibit activities and to perform mechanical feats altogether 
out of proportion to its size, if tried by the human standard. All these 
overflowing energies, I need not say, are available, and utilized by in- 
sects as a rule, in their own interest or in the interest of their family or 
tribe. Although contemptibly weak per unit of number, they are amaz- 
ingly strong per unit of mass, and it is an enormous advantage to them, 
rather than a disadvantage, that the mass unit should be subdivided into 
a multitude of independent number units. 

Insects are, indeed, at the climax of one of the great plans of animal 
structure and development, and man is somewhere near the culmination 
of another and a widely different plan. The competition of insects and 
men is thus largely a competition between two diverse systems of 
anatomy — that of the articulate, with its complicated external skeleton, 
on the one hand, and that of the vertebrate, with its internal skeleton 
on the other. Each has its advantages which the other can not possibly 
duplicate. It is like a war between two nations, one of which should so 
greatly excel in the construction of its firearms and the other in the 
quality of its ammunition that neither could ever gain a decisive and 
final victory. 

Fortunately for us, however, our contest with insects is not between 
two kinds of structure merely — if it were we might not hope to win — 
but it is also between two types of mind. The insect mind is fixed and 
unchangeable; wonderfully adapted by nature to the normal demands 
upon it, but essentially the same for ^11 of each species, virtually in- 
capable of education and beyond the reach of improvement. The corn- 
field ant knows at its birth far better than a man what to do in a corn 
field in its own behalf ; but the man can observe, and learn, and remem- 
ber, and record, and imagine, and invent ; can improve his methods, and 
cultivate his abilities, and can accumulate and transmit his learning and 
his records in an ever-increasing mass. The practical, exact, and effi- 



6 

cient, but wholly unimaginative and uninventive mind of the ant is at 
first a better instrument of adaptation and control than the vacant, un- 
formed, but versatile and improvable mind of primitive man. It is 
only by slow degrees, with the accumulation of knowledge and the or- 
ganization of methods in successive generations, that men and insects 
can come to have something like an equal chance in the struggle for 
supremacy; and it is only by further advances in these methods and 
along these lines — by investigation and education, in short — that we can 
hope finally to free ourselves from a humiliating subordination to what 
we not unreasonably call our ''insect enemies." Is the word "subordi- 
nation" too emphatic? Suppose that our country had been invaded by 
a foreign enemy who had succeeded in completely overrunning it to such 
an extent that we were obliged to dispute with him, everywhere and all 
the time, the bare possession and use of our farms and homes, and the 
products of our toil; and suppose that we were not only totally unable 
to dislodge him from our premises, but that we were compelled to pay 
him a perpetual annual tribute, or tax in kind, of seven and a half dol- 
lars a head for each man, woman, and child in the land — a total of $700,- 
000,000 per annum for the whole United States — while we received from 
him in return, as a contribution to our maintenance, a bare $6,000,000 
worth a year of clover seed (which costs him nothing) and $7,000,000 
worth of honey and wax. Should we have any doubt as to which of the 
two competing populations was the subordinate one? While insects in- 
jure us to an amount approximately fifty times that of the benefits they 
confer, it is at best a doubtful question whether, taking all our activities 
into account, and their final effect on our whole insect population, we 
really do not benefit them in the long run more than we injure them ; it 
is at least an open question whether they are not now more abundant in 
our territory, on an average and as a class, than they were when Colum- 
bus discovered America. 

Insects are, in short, a finished evolutionary product, while man is 
still in the rough. There is no class of animals on this earth which gives 
an intelligent student a more vivid impression of perfect fitness to its 
maintenance, of perfect adaptation to its needs and its surroundings, of 
final and permanent finish, in short, than does this insect class. A bee 
or an ant is a polished gem in a perfect setting ; or, better, we may say 
that the insect world is a perfectly built and precisely adjusted machine, 



which has run continuously from time immemorial, without important 
modification and without repair, and which still whirls steadily on in 
its place, almost noiseless, almost frictionless, a marvel of precise and 
perfect work. The human world, on the other hand, is a great inven- 
tion still in the making — not yet out of the inventor's shop — straining 
itself here as it turns, there grinding itself away, and every once in a 
while breaking down completely in this or the other part, with an appall- 
ing crush of timbers and crash of steel — as in some great war, or in 
some disastrous general strike. 

Such are some of the considerations which led me to say to my liter- 
ary colleague at the University — who laughed loudly into the telephone 
at the suggestion — that entomology signifies more to us than all the rest 
of zoology, and that it really is a subject large enough and important 
enough for a university department of instruction and research. 

Let us now turn to a practical side of this discussion, and see what 
the great and wealthy state of Illinois is doing to help its citizens in this 
still unequal contest. I ought to say in the first place that, relatively to 
other states in the Union, Illinois is really doing very well. The presi- 
dent of the Entomological Society of America, Professor John B. Smith, 
of New Jersey, delivered last December an address to that society on the 
relations of insects and entomologists to the country at large, in the 
course of which he took occasion to say, in speaking of the early official 
entomologists of this state : * ' Illinois is another of the states which has 
never allowed its service to deteriorate, and there is no better work now 
done in the United States, nor is there any more effective organization 
than that within its limits." In speaking of this state, consequently, I 
am not selecting an unfavorable example, but quite the contrary. 

Over forty years ago — in 1867, to be precise — in response to re- 
peated and urgent appeals of its citizens, especially of its horticultur- 
ists, expressed in formal resolutions of a state society, Illinois enlisted 
a regular force for the war against insects, and provided what we may 
call a war fund for its use. This army consisted of one man, B. D. 
Walsh, of Rock Island, an entomologist of extraordinary ability and 
repute, and he was given as a supply for his operations a two-thousand- 
dollar salary and nothing else. He performed as well as he could his 
various duties of private, captain, colonel, adjutant, and major-general 
of this new force — and in two years he was dead. He had two successors 



8 

enlisted for the war on precisely the same terms, the first of whom, Dr. 
Wm. Le Baron, of Geneva, Illinois, maintained for five years the unequal 
contest, when he also died; and the second, Dr. Cyrus Thomas, of Car- 
bondale, abandoned the field in despair after seven years of diligent 
service, going then to Washington for work in another department of 
science, where he lived to the good old age of eighty-five. I have some- 
times wondered if his long survival was not largely due to his fortunate 
escape from an untenable situation. 

It was in 1882, twenty-nine years ago next July, that it fell to me 
to pick up the abandoned standard under conditions which made the con- 
test seem a little less hopeless. Under the parsimonious policy of the 
state, which it seemed useless to try to improve, it may easily be believed 
that the entomologists had accumulated no public property, and not so 
much as a penny's worth of anything came into my hands as a product 
of their fifteen years' work. Being, however, already in the service of 
the state as director of a natural history survey, and blessed in that 
capacity with an office and one assistant, the beginning of a library, and 
a crude collection of insects, mainly bought of a village physician, it 
seemed possible, by an operation which in these commercial times might 
be called a merger, to make these meager facilities partly available to the 
Entomologist's office, and this was done. A little later, in 1884, the work 
was all established by law at the University of Illinois, and so associated 
with the department of instruction there that each division of the rather 
complex organization thus resulting derived some aid or advantage from 
the other; and under substantially these conditions we have continued 
until the present time. 

The Entomologist 's office, it should be said, is not now and never 
has been a department of the University of Illinois, but is both legally 
and financially independent of the university organization. Neverthe- 
less, during this twenty-five year period of common management and 
joint operation it has become so interwoven in function and equipment 
with the related departments that the whole is virtually one indivisible 
enterprise of investigation, publication, and instruction. The Entomolo- 
gist's office is, in fact, merely a differentiated part of the natural history 
survey of the state, dealing with insects, of course, and directed mainly 
to practical ends; and the corresponding university department of in- 
istruction is largely a training school of economic entomologists, from 



9 

which and from the state oflSce so closely associated with it, a long line 
of young men has gone out, and is still going out year after year, for 
service in many other states and in the entomological bureau of the na- 
tional Department of Agriculture. 

Appropriations of twenty-three thousand dollars a year are now 
available to the office for all its work of investigation and inspection, and 
for the publication of its bulletins and biennial reports — a sum sufficient 
to enable it to maintain special assistants continuously in the field in 
different parts of the state, and to keep its work moving, although at 
much too slow a pace, on most of the lines of research for which it has 
been made responsible. 

Organized war against injurious insects is thus at last provided for 
in Illinois, and what we may fairly call a corporal's guard of trained 
and experienced fighters is now constantly in the field. Their enemies 
can scarcely be said to have diminished in number, however, during the 
last twenty-five years, for the insect invasion of the state is still in prog- 
ress. New armies cross our borders at frequent intervals, and fresh up- 
risings occur every now and then, of those already in our midst. 

We arc doing our best service, no doubt, in teaching the individual 
citizen how to defend his own property and person against marauding 
enemies, but this is a slow, tedious, and very difficult process. One of 
our greatest needs is that of recruits for the fighting squad, and these 
we are seeking to get in part by just such instruction work as is now in 
progress here. To drop the military figure, what we most need is aid 
in the work of popular instruction, without which the rest is virtually 
of no avail. 

We have published from the Entomologist's office a total of 4,700 
pages on the injurious insects of Illinois in twenty-five volumes of official 
reports. It is discouraging to think how little of the practical content 
of these papers is actually in the possession or at the personal command 
of the ultimate consumer — of the individual citizen — in whose interest 
this work has all been done and these reports have been prepared. It is 
to you, teachers and prospective teachers of the public schools, that we 
have mainly to look for aid in this dilemma. In helping forward the 
movement for agricultural education in the public school we should not 
forget that economic entomology is a part of scientific agriculture, that 
it has its share, in fact, in every division of that great complex subject — 



10 

how important a share I have attempted to show you as well as I could 
in general terms and in so short a time. 

To the teacher of biology it is especially important to observe that 
while general entomology, like general botany and zoology as ordinarily 
taught in the schools, may be a science of observation and classification 
only, making almost no demand on the reasoning powers, economic en- 
tomology is an experimental science, and involves as a necessary feature 
the whole process of the scientific method. It may be made — it must be 
made, if it is to accomplish its main end — a means of training in obser- 
vation, reflection, and invention, in experiment and verification, and so 
should have an educational value far greater than the biology of the 
ordinary high-school course. We are not weakening high-school science 
in making it really economic; we are making it actually more scientific 
than if its economic applications were ignored, 

I intimated, a while ago, that although man is distinctively a social 
animal, he has something nevertheless to learn from insects with respect 
to the social spirit and to an organization for community service. It 
may seem marvelous, and indeed almost incredible, that this should be 
so. The fact, however, is beyond dispute; and the explanation of it is 
suggestive and important. We are less perfectly adapted than insects to 
the life we are called upon to live, because we have been living it for so 
short a time; we are less fitted for our environment than insects are to 
theirs, because we are progressive animals and change our own environ- 
ment continuously, while they are stereotyped animals and stay in the 
same environment age after age ; with them it is " once adapted, always 
adapted ' ' ; but with us old adaptations are often in the way — a hin- 
drance instead of a help — for they fit us to an environment which has 
disappeared. We have voluntarily progressed, or have been pushed by 
the general improvement of progression, into situations to which our 
habits, our motives, and our traditions no longer correspond ; we tend to 
do things which might have been the correct procedure a thousand or 
ten thousand years ago, but which are now so inadequate and unfit that 
we call them ignorant, or stupid, or wicked and wrong. For these mal- 
adjustments there is but one remedy with us; the cure for the evils of 
progress is more progress; as we change our environment we must also 
change ourselves. 

Now the environment of the American farmer has changed, and is 



11 

still rapidly changing. A generation or two ago he was relatively soli- 
tary and independent; each might do about as he liked with his own 
and it was no one else's business; or, if this were not always so, no one 
was aware of the fact. Now, however, it certainly is so no longer; we 
suffer, all of us, in a thousand ways for other people's faults. The sins 
of the father are visited, not only at long range upon his children and 
his children's children, but at short range also upon his neighbor and 
his neighbor's family. As we are drawn, inevitably and irresistibly, 
year by year, into closer bonds of social and industrial companionship, 
we are bound to become socially and industrially more companionable; 
we must consent to restrictions, in each other's interest, which a gener- 
ation ago would have been thought intolerable; we must volunteer ha- 
bitually mutual services which were once uncalled for ; we must approx- 
imate more closely the methods of the insect colony; we must learn to 
emulate * ' the spirit of the hive ; ' ' we must do intelligently, willingly, and 
purposely, as an act of mental and ethical adaptation to a novel situation, 
what insects learned ages ago to do unconsciously, structurally, physio- 
logically, as a slow and costly result of physical and psychical variation 
fixed by natural selection. 

All this is by way of an approach to the idea that the modern farmer 
not only owes it to himself, but owes it especially to his neighbors, not 
knowingly to breed injurious insects or other pests in his crops or on 
his premises to the subsequent injury of his community. An ant or a 
bee would never do the like; it would die first — would die, indeed, for 
very much less than that. It has learned long ago its lesson of indi- 
vidual service — of individual sacrifice, if necessary for the good of its 
community — learned it for the unanswerable reason that only thus can 
the individual welfare, involved as it is in the welfare of the community, 
be best promoted. We are only beginning to learn this lesson, but the 
sooner we get it learned the less will be the common loss, and the better 
wiU be our position to withstand the assaults of our better trained and 
better disciplined insect enemies. If the farmers of a community were 
as united, as unanimous, as public spirited, and as completely masters 
of the art and method of their calling, as are the ant communities which 
infest their corn fields, no one of them would ever lose his crop because 
of the corn root-aphis and the corn-field ant, because no one would 
allow these insects to multiply and mature to the destruction of his own 



12 

corn, and then to escape to the injury of that of his neighbors; all 
would avail themselves promptly and conscientiously of the facts and 
methods now known to us, sufficient for an arrest of injury and a de- 
struction of the injurious agents; each would do this as a matter of 
principle — that is to say, as a matter of course — even if it seemed to 
diminish for a time the profit on his own operations and investments, 
because, secure in a like action by others, he would know that each 
would profit more by the public spirit of all than any one could profit 
by his own separate selfishness if all were to be equally selfish and 
short-sighted. This view of the farmer's duty to his community may 
seem somewhat Utopian — as implying higher qualities in human nature 
than we have a right to expect at the present time; but why, indeed, 
should the farmer allow the chinch-bugs he has raised in his wheat to 
escape into his neighbor's corn any more than he should allow his cattle 
to break out of their pastures to feed on that neighbor's crops? Why 
should he breed mosquitoes in the waste overflow of the farm creek to 
infect his neighbor's family with the germs of malarial disease, when 
he may not let his child run free if suffering from diphtheria? What- 
ever the individual may say in reply to these pointed questions, the 
state is beginning to answer that there is no reason ; and laws are being 
passed year after year to prevent just this kind of stupid and injurious \ 
selfishness. 

We have had a law of just that description in this state for several 
years, and we owe its enactment to the San Jose scale — a Chinese insect 
which came secretly to this country by way of Japan in 1872. This 
was a case of Japanese invasion far more successful, and probably more 
destructive also, than any which Japan could possibly make by means 
of dreadnoughts and armies of little brown men. Establishing itself 
thoroughly on the Pacific Coast at San Jose, it next made a long leap 
quite across the continent to New Jersey, and from that state as a center 
it has dispatched its armies of invaders into every state in the Union, 
in some states into every county, and in some counties onto every farm. 
Armies of orchardists are now fighting it yearly everywhere, and train 
loads of ammunition in the form of sulphur and lime, thousands of 
small arms in the form of spraying pumps, and hundreds of pieces of 
artillery — the great power sprayers — are in the hands of these armies; 
and in order that no indifferent noncombatant may give aid and com- 



13 

fort to the enemy which the rest are engaged in fighting, it is made by 
law a misdemeanor, punishable by a fine, to give it food and lodgment 
on one's premises. This same law, enforced by watchful inspectors, has 
been our sole, but sufficient, means of defense in this state against another 
destructive insect invader, the brown-tail moth, which would have 
been established by this time in scores of Illinois nurseries and hundreds 
of Illinois orchards if it had not been stopped and destroyed on its way 
from France before it had reached its destination. My own squad of 
inspectors captured and burned alive several hundred thousand of these 
French invaders in the winter and spring of 1908-09, and several thou- 
sands more in 1909-10. It is the object of such laws, not to compel the 
people to do their duty, but to aid them in defending their property 
by making their defense effective. These laws are also a great educa- 
tional agency, for those charged with their administration and enforce- 
ment must, of course, show the people concerned just what to do and 
just how to do it to meet the obligations which the law imposes. 

Of course there is not the slightest difference, in principle, between 
the special case of the San Jose scale and many other cases of dangerous 
insect injury to which the law has never yet been applied. If all the 
infested wheat stubble in the country were to be burned over or plowed 
under for a single summer, the additional precaution being taken to 
burn the chaff and screenings from infested fields at threshing-time, 
all the Hessian fly in the country would be at once destroyed, and sub- 
sequent injury by that insect would become impossible. It now causes 
the loss of many millions of dollars every year, and no one can fully 
protect himself against it because of the Hessian flies bred by his neigh- 
bors in their neglected fields. There is no more reason why these condi- 
tions should be permitted to continue than there is reason to permit the 
San Jose scale to range abroad at will; and when our people acknowl- 
edge this fact and are willing to support laws and regulations based upon 
it, we shall find legislatures and state officers ready enough to act accord- 
ing to their wishes. At present the farmer may appeal to the state law 
and the entomological inspector for the protection of his orchard or 
his raspberry patch against insects abroad in his neighborhood, but he 
must take care of his corn and oats and pastures for himself. In that 
undertaking the state gives him only information and advice, and no 
efficient aid. 



14 

Evidently we have, in this teeming world of insect life, one of the 
greatest forces of nature, largely hostile to our interests, and but slightly 
available for any of our purposes. Its conquest and control are one of 
the original remaining problems of our civilization to which we must 
give the same grade of skilled and thoughtful attention that we are 
giving to the mastery of contagious disease, itself largely an insect 
problem, or to the planning and making of a Panama canal. 

The people of Illinois lately voted twenty millions of dollars for 
the construction of a ship canal, the value and need of which seem to be 
still matters of grave dispute — a sum which, at our present rate of 
expenditure, would run our state department of entomological investi- 
gation for eight hundred and seventy years. Our progress is too slow, 
and it is time to speed up. 

And the new educational movement must help us on to give prac- 
tical effect to what we already know, for it is our ignorance that hinders 
us. It is a reproach both to our education and to our industrial enter- 
prise that we should have to make, in this beginning of the twentieth 
century, any such confession of incompetency as is contained in this 
paper. It is a hopeful sign of the day that the economic entomologist 
has, now and then, the opportunity to tell some part of his story of the 
ways of insects and their relation to human life and welfare to audiences 
like this, made up so largely of active and prospective teachers. It is a 
privilege I appreciate, and for which I heartily thank the managers of 
this institute. 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 



Q Q15 793 749 2 



